AI News, Designing Customizable Self-Folding Swarm Robots

Designing Customizable Self-Folding Swarm Robots

The motion characteristics of these robots can be tweaked by adjusting the length of their legs, which makes them a useful platform to experiment with design changes, especially since leg length adjustment is easily automated as part of the design and construction process.

The structure of these robots is primarily composite laminates: Paperboard and spring steel for strength, kapton for flexibility, a pre-strained polystyrene shape memory material to control the self-folding process, plus an adhesive to bind all the layers once they’ve been laser cut into shape.

Once everything is sandwiched together, an embedded heating circuit activates the shape memory material to fold the flat sheets into a four-bar parallelogram linkage that makes sure the robot’s legs always end up at the same angle.

The heating circuit draws much more power than the robot does while it’s in motion, so it’s attached to offboard power and hot glued to the robot, disconnecting when the folding process is complete.

Next steps include changing the structure of the robot (beyond just the legs) to see what kinds of advantages and disadvantages such changes could lend to a heterogenous swarm, as well as working towards having more than one of these things zipping around at the same time, as the researchers explain: Future work will investigate how the robot structure can be tailored to a given payload or environment.

Amazing Science

A country&rsquo;s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.

we are suffering from seven years of government failure where ministers thought their job was to watch the economy and suffer passively from capitalism&rsquo;s inevitable cycles.

Rather than take a view of the economy and by fiscal action seek to secure prosperity for all, ministers embarked on a highly ideological agenda of dismantling the state and the protections afforded to workers &ndash;

Mr Hammond has been forced to alter course because his party&rsquo;s reckless policies had jeopardized the long-term improvement in the national standard of life.

After big leaps in artificial intelligence, as our magazine cover story charts, robots have finally reached a maturity that allows mass deployment.

Ever since Elizabeth I denied a patent for a knitting machineover concerns it would create unemployment, political leaders have worried about job-killing machines.

Consider the introduction of driverless vehicles, which Mr Hammond said would mean a million people who drive for a living having to find new jobs.

Besides the research, humanoid robots are being developed to perform human tasks like personal assistance, through which they should be able to assist the sick and elderly, and dirty or dangerous jobs.

In essence, since they can use tools and operate equipment and vehicles designed for the human form, humanoids could theoretically perform any task a human being can, so long as they have the proper software.

Humanoid robots, especially those with artificial intelligence algorithms, could be useful for future dangerous and/or distant space exploration missions, without having the need to turn back around again and return to Earth once the mission is completed.

The Shadow Hand uses an array of 34 tactels arranged beneath its polyurethane skin on each finger tip.[3] Tactile sensors also provide information about forces and torques transferred between the robot and other objects.

While electric coreless motor actuators are better suited for high speed and low load applications, hydraulic ones operate well at low speed and high load applications.

In planning and control, the essential difference between humanoids and other kinds of robots (like industrial ones) is that the movement of the robot has to be human-like, using legged locomotion, especially biped gait.

Maintenance of the robot’s gravity center over the center of bearing area for providing a stable position can be chosen as a goal of control.[4] To maintain dynamic balance during the walk, a robot needs information about contact force and its current and desired motion.

To allow humanoids to move in complex environments, planning and control must focus on self-collision detection, path planning and obstacle avoidance.

On Monday, January 21, 2019

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